Food

There are some things that we eat a lot of, here in our travels. Shai randomly gets cravings for apples and generally buys them in bulk from either a grocery store or the covered and usually crazy food markets. I´m trying to only buy my food from these markets, I love them so much. She also consumes a lot of this watery thing that people sell along the side of streets unrefridgerated. It comes in a plastic goblet with small chocolate balls on top, which you´re supposed to pour into the yogurt.

I´ve been on a quinoa kick and have tried to prepare it in different fashions, although I´ve really only had one success: quinoa with tomatoes, onions and garlic. I tried to cook this when we were in Arequipa, except with the addition of bell pepper. I bought two big, round peppers from the central market. I chopped them all up and mindlessly slipped a piece of pepper in my mouth as I was finishing, only to die from its spiciness. I had no idea that peppers that look decievingly like sweet bell peppers could be so horrifyingly hot. My lips burned for a good 20 minutes after eating it. They had black seeds, but I still don´t know if that was a sign or if all peppers here have them.

I think I forgot to mention our transportation fun, so I´ll mention it now. There have been a bunch of transportation strikes throughout the country due to a few factors, none of which I fully understand but I´ll skim over anyway.
1) Some people (possibly indigenous) are protesting the privatization of water.
2) Local indigenous peoples are protesting oil drilling in the Amazon.
So we got into Arequipa from Ica at around 9am, after being on a bus for 13 hours. We checked into our hostel (Home Sweet Home - it was cute, although a little far from the center), wandered around the town for a good majority of the day, and got back at around 6pm to find out from someone sharing the dorm with us that the road to Cuzco was going to be blocked for a week starting the next day at 6am. We had been planning to hang out in Arequipa for a few days and then meander over to Lake Titicaca, from where we would head on to Cuzco. This was bad news, since it meant we wouldn´t be able to get into Cuzco for at least a week if we didn´t leave before 6am. I had been cooking the quinoa when we found out, so I hurried it up, threw the quinoa in a plastic bag (this wasn´t the first time) to bring with me, and we headed straight for the train station to find out what was going on. We ended up buying bus tickets for Cuzco that night and left at 8:30 pm, to arrive in Cuzco at 6am. So we spent 12 hours in Arequipa, after having traveled a total of 17 hours (Lima to Ica to Arequipa) to get there. And that´s how we got to Cuzco. (For the record, the blocade ended up not even happening. Tuesday was supposedly a nation-wide transport strike, which also didn´t happen. We´ve also heard that there are blocades occuring between here and La Paz, which is our next destination after Macchu Pichu, but who knows what´s actually happening.)

Today we´re meeting up with Josie, another friend from Grinnell who moved to Cuzco to become fluent in Spanish, and then we´re going to Chabad (an Orthodox sect of Judaism who has centers set up in popular travel spots for Jews) for dinner tonight to celebrate Shabbat (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown is special in Judaiasm, celebrated on Fri with prayers and dinner). I´m really curious about who these people are that run the center, who will go, what we´ll eat. It should be an interesting experience.